Hardware

Two more things.

1. Don't think that I don't realize I am messing up the definitions of freeware, open source, etc. It's just that I hold these sorts of movements in such profound contempt that I can't even be bothered to look up their definitions. To me, it's like trying to differentiate between "expressionism", "cubism", "abstraction" and the like.

2. And here's another question that someone should be asking: why do open source games suck but not operating systems? EVERYTHING open source sucks: the difference is that we can play and understand games, and thus evaluate them properly, but the people who can evaluate properly operating systems are very few, so we don't have good evaluations of them. And how is it that a game can be good while running on a bad operating system? Because the game's code COMPENSATES for the operating system's deficiencies (by way of the programmers having to do more work, etc., to get the same job done that they would have done much easier on a better operating system). That's also why I can tell you that phpBB and Joomla suck, while I refrain from voicing an opinion on Linux, Android, Windows, etc. The game, or the application, are the VISIBLE part of the iceberg to us, and that's why, when the VISIBLE part is open source, we can spot the SHITTINESS right away (or at any rate I can: you obviously can't spot it on applications, and there's a good chance that you are merely pretending to spot in on games because everyone else is spotting it). Personally I have no doubt that if I had had the background in software engineering I would have spotted countless retardations in Linux, Android and the like -- BEYOND the fact that they don't run any games.

Or take your papering over of Linux's lacking multidisplay support. This is an utter deal-breaker, not only for games, but also for work. Who uses a computer with only a single screen in 2014? It's like trying to sell me a car that has no wheels. "But the suspension is amazing!" Motherfucker the car has NO FUCKING WHEELS, what DIFFERENCE does it make how good the suspension is! The damn thing CAN'T EVEN FUCKING MOVE!

"But multidisplay support is coming with some other piece of software sometime in the future!"

Meanwhile the rest of us have been using multiple displays on Windows since the previous decade... How long will this new piece of software take? I am already 36, is it going to come before I pass over my computer to my CHILDREN?

Or take that other fagotry about Tegra or whatever. "It's too late for Linux because this Tegra thing is already on the horizon!" I.e. some other piece of shit software(/hardware?) thing that doesn't run anything is better than the other piece of shit software that doesn't run anything.

You know what? Tegra is just as fucked as Linux because there is TEGNUX on the horizon, and it'll be a MILLION TIMES BETTER THAN BOTH! What is Tegnux, you may ask? It's this amazing awesome thing that does everything the bestest! There's only a little catch with it: THAT IT DOESN'T YET EVEN EXIST. It in fact exists so little that it's not even in anyone's IMAGINATION yet -- only in mine. And that's PRECISELY why it can have all the fantastical qualities that I can dream up for it and totally obliterate everything else!

TEGNUX IS THE FUTURE. YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST. AND IF IT DOESN'T HAPPEN BEFORE YOU DIE, IT'LL HAPPEN AFTERWARDS! TRUST ME ON THIS, I READ IT IN THE TEGNUX FORUMS!

Or maybe it will be Yellow Socks Tegnux that will dominate in "the end". Yellow Socks Tegnux is a forked version of Tegnux. The difference is that it has two yellow socks below the Tegnux logo in the startup screen. And also it runs nothing. Actually, it runs less than nothing, because Tegnux already runs nothing. It's like negative and imaginary numbers in mathematics: no one knows what they are good for, and yet people still use them.

icycalm wrote:So the advantage of open source software is that it encourages, say Google to work harder than it otherwise would? Like setting a hungry wolf after yourself while running so that you'll run faster?

No, that is just a side-effect one observes. The Linux kernel is used for various purposes by most of the major technology companies because they don't want to re-invent the wheel dozens of times. (That's why open-source exists to begin with.) For instance, and this isn't a perfect example, but Google originally forked the Linux kernel into an Android kernel, but later re-integrated the Linux kernel because they couldn't keep up with the rapid pace of Linux development.

So your theory that open-source = bad may have some truth, but the reality is that Linux is like a software cancer that has spread to virtually everything. They're putting it in cars now too -- wtf? It's what we have. And it would take an enormous amount of work for a single company like Microsoft to be able to replicate those results in a closed-source fashion. Google couldn't even do it with their fork, now imagine trying to do it from scratch....

That is not to say open-source software is "better", just that it has won, to some extent. Why did you choose phpBB and not vBulletin or Invision Power Boards? I don't know IPB, but my experience with vBulletin has been vastly better than phpBB. But whatever your reason was, it's probably similar to why companies choose Linux. It's free, popular, familiar, and it gets the job done well enough. If not even you can bring yourself to choose the proprietary solution, how can you expect companies the world over to only use closed-source software because of a principle? What does the principle accomplish that can't be accomplished for a lower price? Your principle only seems relevant to people for whom money isn't any object at all -- which is understandable given your background -- but money is always an object even for wealthy corporations. I don't see any way to change that, ever.

icycalm wrote:And here's another question that someone should be asking: why do open source games suck but not operating systems?

Freetard games are developed by sad, fat losers who live with their moms. Most freetard operating systems are also developed this way. But big, fancy open-source projects like Linux and Firefox are developed directly by or with the backing of corporations. Firefox development is funded by Google (your wolf analogy comes to mind... I do not understand this lol) and Linux kernel developers are directly employed by Red Hat, Intel, IBM, Samsung, Google, Oracle, NVIDIA, Cisco, AMD, and countless other corporations. There are other examples too like OpenStack.

I don't see these as exceptions either, because to me, good software is created or at least funded by companies regardless of the licensing. (Even then, of course, it could still suck.) A good piece of open-source software that wasn't produced by a company would be a true exception. I've said VLC is one, but I've never used anything different aside from WMP. Are you telling me there is a better one that costs money, or just that there "could be" in some nebulous proprietary-only future where making pay-to-use media players is suddenly a profitable business venture?

So let me revise: big and complex software can only be good if BIG COMPANIES create it or fund it, and the licensing has no inherent effect on the quality (that we know of), but it can affect adoption. Small, simple software can be created by just about anyone, and the licensing here does matter because people will almost always choose the most powerful of the cheapest options, i.e. the open-source ones since they get all the plugins and extensions. And that's why Opera is still irrelevant despite being "better" in some theoretical way according to you. So how does your theory improve on what I've just said? I don't think it does. You've backpedaled on half a dozen things this whole conversation. I know it's because you don't care about this stuff. But I don't go into the STG threads announcing that STGs are irrelevant because I've read Nietzsche and visited lots of cities therefore I know such things. I simply don't read those threads, or if I do, I don't say anything until I've learned more. You taught me this kind of respect.

By the way.

icycalm wrote:there's a good chance that you are merely pretending to spot in on games because everyone else is spotting it

It is, erm, not the least bit insulting that you think I'm incapable of spotting everything that's wrong with this:



Or even with well-known freetard games like Xonotic. I would have to be many ranks below even a GameFAQs poster. Hell, even below an artfag. If that were the case I think you wouldn't even want me breathing on your forum, yet you're replying to my posts.

I know it's hard to tell where exactly people are ranked in relation to each other from such a high altitude, like trying to distinguish dwarfs from giants on the ground while looking out an airplane. But really? I can't spot the problems with freetard games? How would I even be able to write legible English with that kind of deficient brain function?

Some unimportant clarifications: Linux doesn't lack proper multidisplay support for work, only for games, where it can get screwy. And NVIDIA TEGRA K1 is a mobile graphics processor that got a lot of hype at CES 2014. But I spoke too soon now that I've seen some actual benchmarks of it: http://www.gottabemobile.com/2014/01/13 ... -graphics/ And here I thought it was supposed to be competitive to actual graphics cards.

Finally, the simple answer to why I'm here and not on some interminably boring Linux forum is that reading On the Genealogy of Art Games was like waking up from a very long sleep, therefore I value your opinions on everything. (And I haven't even read the third essay yet. My order never came and I placed it nearly two years ago lol! Keep forgetting to ask you about that...)

I do love videogames and that's what I signed up for, but after one or two failed attempts to talk about even the simplest ones intelligently (e.g., Hotline Miami), I'm giving myself a good 10 years or more before I start sharing my opinions on them again, if ever. There's only one game I consider myself an expert on right now and it's not worth reviewing. I know that makes it look like I don't care about games, but it doesn't matter what you think of me as long as I can read your opinions. I mean it does matter, but it's not something I can easily change right now.

Joshua wrote:So your theory that open-source = bad may have some truth, but the reality is that Linux is like a software cancer that has spread to virtually everything. They're putting it in cars now too -- wtf? It's what we have. And it would take an enormous amount of work for a single company like Microsoft to be able to replicate those results in a closed-source fashion. Google couldn't even do it with their fork, now imagine trying to do it from scratch....

That is not to say open-source software is "better", just that it has won, to some extent.

Democracy has also "won". What does that mean? Do you see me running my forum democratically? Do you see any military in the world being run democratically? Any business? Any organization that produces anything useful at all?

Linux has "won" then. But it's still useless for anyone I have ever met or heard of in my life. So what has it "won" then? You can't even run a second monitor on it!

http://ask.slashdot.org/story/13/07/27/ ... t-in-linux

"I'm an Engineer with a need for 3 large monitors on the one PC. I want to run them as 'one big desktop' so I can drag windows around between all three monitors (Windows XP style). I run Debian and an nVidia NVS450. Currently I have been able to do what I want by using Xinerama which is painfully slow (think 1990s), or using TwinView which is hardware accelerated but only supports 2 monitors. I can live without 3D performance, but I need a hardware accelerated 2D desktop at the minimum. What are my options? I will happily give up running X and run something else if I need to (although I would like to keep using Xfce — but am open to anything). I am getting so desperate that I am starting to think of running Windows on my box, but that would be painful in so many other ways given my work environment revolves around the Linux toolset."

SOFTWARE ENGINEERS CAN'T GET A SECOND MONITOR TO WORK WITH IT! THEY HAVE TO RUN TO SLASHDOT LOL!

So we are back to square one again, of you attempting to convince me to use something which, not only plays no games, but runs nothing outside of games either. Or of you trying to convince me that, some time after I am dead, Linux will actually be useful.

What is the point of reading philosophy if you are so stupid you can't even parse these simple facts?

I banned you since it's obvious that you haven't had anything new to say for several posts now, but no intention of giving up. You'd just come back at me with something retarded like "BUT LINUX IS USED IN BICYCLES NOW", and I'd scream back "BUT WTF DOES THAT HAVE TO DO WITH GAMES OR WITH ANYTHING WE'VE BEEN DISCUSSING AT ALL", and it would simply never end, because I have a life and you don't. I let you run amok for a while because I wanted to demonstrate how to shut down the typical linuxroid, but the fun is over (having passed WAAAAAY over your head) and I have other stuff to do now so goodbye.

And by the way,

Joshua wrote:Freetard games are developed by sad, fat losers who live with their moms.

And what kind of people do you think is Linux defended by on videogame forums? Say hi to your mom from me.

Actually, fuck banning you. I am going to deactivate your account for this:

Joshua wrote:You've backpedaled on half a dozen things this whole conversation.

My tolerance has its limits, and receiving unsubstantiated insults by an utter retard like you is way beyond them.

Your post is so full of retardations, I could spent half my evening pointing them out.

Joshua wrote:You've backpedaled on half a dozen things this whole conversation. I know it's because you don't care about this stuff. But I don't go into the STG threads announcing that STGs are irrelevant because I've read Nietzsche and visited lots of cities therefore I know such things. I simply don't read those threads, or if I do, I don't say anything until I've learned more. You taught me this kind of respect.

You needed the number 1 philosopher on the planet to teach you not to speak about stuff you don't understand? Really? And you are proud of this fact?

Joshua wrote:Firefox development is funded by Google (your wolf analogy comes to mind... I do not understand this lol)

Is this supposed to be a dig at my analogy? WTF do I care where Google gives money? They've got billions: they give to everyone. What does that prove about anything?

Joshua wrote:and Linux kernel developers are directly employed by Red Hat, Intel, IBM, Samsung, Google, Oracle, NVIDIA, Cisco, AMD, and countless other corporations.

You know what else is directly employed in every farm in the world? Water that is not clean enough to drink. What does that mean? That the future of potable water is water that is not clean enough to drink?

But I have already explained this with some other tortuous analogy in the previous page. The problem then is not my explanations or my analogies, but the lack of brain power on your part to understand them.

Joshua wrote:I've said VLC is one, but I've never used anything different aside from WMP. Are you telling me there is a better one that costs money, or just that there "could be" in some nebulous proprietary-only future where making pay-to-use media players is suddenly a profitable business venture?

There you go again. How many times in this thread have I explained to you that you should DISREGARD the exception if you want to understand the rule? And here you are again, as if nothing has been said, trying to one-up me by triumphantly shoving the exception in my face. And to top it all off, MY future is supposed to be "nebulous". MY future, whereas the entire time I have been talking to you of the present and the past. Meanwhile, the only place in which Linux is useful as an operating system is IN YOUR BRAIN, and all the rest of us in the real world use Windows.

What's worse is that the only reason media players are not profitable as business ventures is because they are such simple applications that any bored college student can churn them out in his free time, which is exactly what happened with Winamp, VLC and the like -- and iTunes is STILL better than them! And you might think that iTunes is free, but that is only an illusion, since the vast majority of Mac users buy Macs (and pay the "Apple tax") precisely in order to have access to applications like iTunes! (which, precisely because they are proprietary software that Apple makes, either run only on Macs or run better on Macs). Even the one exception you tried to shove in my face is a bad exception lol! Even in that tiny little detail in which you wanted to prove superior to me you are inferior!

Joshua wrote:And NVIDIA TEGRA K1 is a mobile graphics processor that got a lot of hype at CES 2014. But I spoke too soon now that I've seen some actual benchmarks of it: http://www.gottabemobile.com/2014/01/13 ... -graphics/ And here I thought it was supposed to be competitive to actual graphics cards.

You thought that a mobile chipset could compete with my 2000-dollar graphics cards that require the use of a 1,500 Watt power supply?

Seriously?

When was the last time you played a contemporary videogame, 1993?

Joshua wrote:Or even with well-known freetard games like Xonotic. I would have to be many ranks below even a GameFAQs poster.

Just like the Ghetto moron: all the posers have a problem with gamefaqs. Meanwhile, gamefaqs is home to thousands of hardcore gamers, plenty of which have written reviews for the site that wouldn't be out of place on my frontpage. You are unimaginably lower than the average gamefaqs poster. No one on gamefaqs, for example, would be stupid enough to bother with Linux at all -- never mind defending it in the forum of the number 1 videogame site in the world.

Like I said, I could spend half my evening tearing apart your utter retardations, but I am going to watch a movie instead. Enough is fucking enough. For the rest, my readers can use their imagination.

GDC preview: Windows 10 vs SteamOS, Digital Foundry explores two competing visions for the future of PC gaming: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digit ... s-steam-os

SteamOS gaming performs significantly worse than Windows, Ars analysis shows: cross-platform 3D games face 21- to 58-percent frame rate dip on same hardware: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/11/a ... os-gaming/

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Complaining about bloated Windows for years and then failing to even equal it trolololol.

Which the autists will counter is the fault of the game devs and hardware devs for not optimizing their drivers. So now, not only will the Linux player have to compile the game, he will have to write the drivers too lol. One step further and the autists will tell us to write the operating system ourselves before we can play a game lol. No wonder they never play anything.

I want to apologize for the numerous ways in which I insulted icycalm earlier in this thread and polluted his forum with nonsense. I was aggressively wrong and icycalm didn't deserve to be screeched at for pointing something out to me that was clear as day. He is very generous for allowing me back here after everything I said.

Since the time of this thread I've become really disillusioned with Valve. This is the SteamOS thread so I might as well comment on it, since I used it for a while on release and you won't find any of my below comments in professional reviews.

Valve hyped up SteamOS to be some new special made-for-gaming operating system, but it's just Steam Big Picture Mode running on a deformed and broken configuration of Linux. For instance, sound was completely broken on release. Some games had stuttering sound, which could only be fixed by dropping to the desktop and editing some text config files. Voice chat also didn't work reliably, and a couple months after release, it became completely broken. You literally cannot talk to other people on SteamOS without installing third-party software, which Valve made ridiculously hard and complicated compared to regular desktop Linux (Ubuntu, which uses an app store). You also can't install non-Steam games and have them accessible from the Steam interface. And simply dropping to the desktop was an exercise in frustration since, due to the strange way they configured SteamOS, the Steam Controller doesn't work there, so you have to plug in a keyboard and mouse. It's so sad. The funny thing is, desktop Linux has none of these problems, Valve just took a hard problem and made it harder.

They did nothing at all to make it successful either, due to their "philosophy" of being against exclusives, which makes no fucking sense. Apart from 2-3 games per year that I can think of, game developers don't target Windows because Microsoft is paying them for exclusivity. They target it because time and money are finite. It is amazing that Valve expects game developers to double or triple some of their expenses (e.g. QA, support, finding cross-platform middleware) just to earn brownie points for not being platform-exclusive. But all games are platform-exclusive -- Windows, Mac, and Linux are not the only PC operating systems in the universe! Why doesn't Valve start getting the NetBSD community hyped up about a "NetBSD-based gaming system", and NetBSD ports? Is the corrupt Linux Foundation paying them to ignore other open-source OSes?!

It's all bullshit. Valve's business model is basically: game and hardware developers take all the risk, and we make all the money and take three-week vacations in Hawaii. I can't say it isn't working well for them, but they'll never achieve their goals if that's all they're ever going to do.

Your problem was that you didn't grasp what an earth-shaking task it would be to challenge Windows' gaming supremacy. I saw it immediately, and so did Carmack, for example, who said somewhere that Valve's ideas on the subject were "ridiculous".

Even now you are still utterly failing to grasp the main problem. All the stuff you pointed out would have been negligible if Linux offered better performance than Windows. People spend thousands of dollars to get 5 or 10 extra frames per second; if switching to another OS did that, they would have laughed at the problems that you mentioned.

Your instinctive support of an operating system with no exclusives and your continued failure to grasp the all-consuming importance of performance are merely a consequence of the fact that you don't play games. It all starts with this, and it ends here too. There is nothing more to say. It would even be weird if a non-gamer's view of any aspect of the gaming industry made any sense at all, never mind challenging the views of a gamer -- never mind of the kinds of gamers who post here.

Imagine someone announcing a new console that has no new games planned for it. All it does is play SOME old games. That's it.

"Does it at least play them faster than other consoles?"

"No, it plays them slower."

What sane gamer could ever want this console, let alone get so excited about it that he would go around the internet defending it on forums?